Introduction: Everyone will agree that the cinema is one of our culture’s most powerful art forms. What it is best at is heightening emotions. With the form’s camera framing, music, editing techniques, and other elements, a master of the movies can concentrate our attention on the minutia and nuances of certain states of mind. This is especially potent when it comes to the erotic arts. In this series of bulletins, I will highlight films that capture some essentials of BDSM, D/s, S/m sessions, and power dynamics. We can do this because, since at least the 1990s, dominant women have ceased to be a gag moment of comedy relief and become accepted, normalized if you will, from Julie Strain appearing suddenly an heart-stoppingly as a Dominatrix in full regalia in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 to the devil’s assistant Mazikine (Lesley-Ann Brandt)  in the recent TV series Lucifer.

Eating Raoul (1982)

Paul Bartel (1938-2000) was one of the funniest indie or low budget film satirists. Beginning in short films, he graduated to low budget features and never worked in mainstream Hollywood. He was part of the Roger Corman crew, though, where he wrote, acted in, and directed films, including Death Race 2000, and later went on to do campy comedies such as Lust in the Dust. But his premiere epic is the black comedy Eating Raoul, in which Dominatrixes feature prominently. 

The film depicts the situation of Paul and Mary Bland, who aspire to open a “country kitchen,” but are short of funds. One night a “swinger” looking for the local orgy stumbles into the Blands’s apartment and, as heterosexual males tend to do in Bartel films, tries to rape Mary. Paul kills him. Subsequently realizing how easy it is to kill rich careless people who are only “sex-crazed maniacs whom no one will miss,” they turn this accident into a get-rich-quick scheme. Things grow complicated when local locksmith Raoul attempts to horn in on this scheme, then betray the Blands. 

Set in a Hollywood, California which an outlandish “educational” opening narration describes as “Home to the rich and powerful, yet so popular with the broken and destitute, here sex-hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life, and instant gratification is tirelessly pursued, [in] a center of casual violence and capricious harassment. Where rampant vice and amorality permeate every stratum of society … It is a known fact that prolonged exposure to just such a psychopathic environment will eventually warp even the most normal and decent among us,” the viewer is prepared to wallow in decadence, as the square Blands enter the world of swingers and sex ads. Mary ends up catering to the fantasies and playacting of various crazy men, and under the influence of hallway neighbor Doris (Susan Saiger), or Doris the Dominatrix, at one point Mary becomes Cruel Carla, dolled up in fetish-night all-leather suits and boots. 

Mary is of course played by Mary Woronov, who was a member of Warhol’s Factory set while she lived in New York City as a painter. She appeared in one of Warhol’s shorts performing a bullwhip dance, and as the recipient of the title action in Kiss the Boot (1966). 

Also an author, Ms Woronov published Snake in 2000, which appears to be a semi-autobiographical novel. On pages 54-55, she provided these insights, born of the main character’s “descent” into the Manhattan leather scene: “There were advantages to dating a pervert. Sandra‘s apartment was spotless thanks to the two fags Donald sent to her door over every week. They both had flip hairdos and matching bags in which they brought their French maid outfits. Cleaning was their thing. They teetered around with their giant feet painfully squashed into black patent leather spiked heels, one only doing the polishing while the other cleaned everything else like a madwoman on speed. They kept their eyes down, worked all day, and loved to be reprimanded. At 5 o’clock, they got back in their regular clothes, and, thanking Sandra, shoved 100 bucks in her hand instead of the other way around. In this respect, she was the envy of the building … No one had told her what a lot of work it was being a dominatrix. Donald and she never made it the normal way anymore. She couldn’t just fall in the sack and get laid. No, she had to open the equipment closet and drag all that stuff out. It took her hours to get dressed for sex. Preparation was taking over her life, and, to avoid it, she started spending more and more time in Tonya’s studio.” The ring of authenticity to these observations inspires some pleasing speculation about the six-foot-tall Woronov. 

Mary Woronov collaborated a lot with Paul Bartel, making several films with him directing, and acting with him in some 17 others, often playing husband and wife. The zany Blands are probably their most popular performances which they repeated in the horror film Chopping Mall, and the film itself proved to be so popular as to inspire a stage musical, a comic book, and became a prestige Criterion Collection choice. Bartel died before filming a planned sequel, Band Ambition, in which the pair run jointly for governors of California. 

Mary remains Woronov’s richest creation, a character to unveils the comedic and outlandish elements that often undergird the S/m binary. 

UPDATE: (2 April 2020) 

Continuing research into Mary Woronov’s career leads to her memoir about the Factory Years, Swimming Underground (High Risk Books, 1995), and a peek at her breakthrough movie, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, all with interesting results. 

An early “making of” chapter on Chelsea Girls illuminates her inner life and demons. The Factory was a place of drug-fueled narcissists and ambitious artists, hangers-on, and hustlers. In this chapter as in the rest of the book, she recounts the details of the shoot with Warhol and his co-director Paul Morrissey, while also reflecting simultaneously on her childhood, in this case, her violent temper. 

Her segment in Chelsea Girls is called “Hanoi Hannah,” and is supposed to be some kind of Vietnam interrogation scene. As Mary puts it, it was a “very much an S&M set-up, with me in the S part.” Her co-performer was Velvet, AKA International Velvet, and it seems that Mary didn’t too much like this Boston-bred Edie Sedgwick wannabe. Before the camera eventually rolls, Mary admits to “watching Velvet build her incredible sand castle of powder and mascara that I had every intention of kicking in with my new platform boots.” 

It turns out that as a kid Mary discovered that she was seized with the urge from time to time to violently beat other people – girls, boys, it didn’t matter. She named this urge Violet, and in her mind it took the form in her chest of a black dog who needed release, growling at her until she heeded its siren call.

This is an extremely well-crafted except, and Mary is a bright former Cornel student who ended up as a skeptic in Warhol’s orbit because, she believed, she was another Slavic Roman Catholic and he could trust her, unlike the others. The chapter even offers a fascinating interpretation of the Circe section of The Odyssey.

We learn that Mary preferred to act like a guy, which explains her garb in the sequence, a striped shirt, jeans, and a tough’s watchband, along with her manner of speech. Unfortunately, she was attracted to men who were even tougher than she, to her romantic dismay. This helps explain Mary’s many hard-edged, domineering roles for Roger Corman and other producer-directors in films such as Death Race 2000, Rock ’n’ Roll High, and House of the Devil. I thought she was a prison warden in a Corman EIP (women in prison) film, but can’t find it. 

 Be forewarned: Chelsea Girls is a shakily photographed, poorly sound recorded, overlong exercise in blended scripted and improvised play-acting. Warhol’s “innovation” was to project two separate reels of film on the screen simultaneously, sometimes of different stories, sometimes different, earlier, or later takes of the same story. It’s small pleasures reside in Mary’s screen charisma, especially a moment when while dominating Velvet and another character, the camera catches her in close up revealing a true, sublime pleasure in looking down on her victims. 

The Stranglers of Bombay (1959)

Terrence Fisher’s Hammer Film, made after his Frankenstein and Dracula hits, is not strictly an exploration of S/m, but certainly touches on the theme in the persona of Karim (Marie Devereux), an acolyte of the Thuggee cult, who delights in witnessing torture and eventually participating in it. 

It’s easy to see how the late Ms. Devereux sparked a small cult following at the time. She has a dramatic figure, and was frank about showing it off, like her contemporary Betty Page. Born in Edmonton, London, in 1940 as Patricia Sutcliffe, she was primarily a photographer’s model, but made some significant contributions to cinema, including among her 26 works, as Dora Radosevick in the Avengers episode from 1961, “The Radioactive Man,” and most significantly, in two back-to-back Sam Fuller films, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. Suffice it to say, she is never disappointing. 

Stranglers is one of Hammer’s forays into historical fiction and colonialism. The plot concerns a certain Harry Lewis,  a captain in the British East India Company, who is investigating the disappearance of over 2,000 indigenous citizens. His theory proves correct, that a group with inside information is attacking trekking merchants and others and hiding the bodies. Bureaucratic indifference and corruption compel Lewis to investigate on his own, resulting in his capture – twice! – by the Kali worshiping Thuggee clan, who first stake him out to be dehydrated and attacked by vermin, and later to be burned alive. Though slow-paced and never quite as excited by its own material as it should be, Stranglers is well-worth seeing for Ms. Devereaux’s dominating personality. 

The Stranglers of Bombay is one of those films that a kid will stumble on and unexpectedly be riveted by the bondage sequence, a life-altering event that can take the young viewer down a wholly different path. 

The late Raymond Durgnat is worth quoting at length on the film, from his book Eros in the Cinema (Calder and Boyars, 1966), for Durgnat was adept at reading the minds of viewers and elucidating nuances and implications and paradoxes in popular cinema.  Durgnat notes that the film 

“crystallizes two very contemporary attitudes to violence – a very sharp consciousness of its erotic excitation, and a methodical attitude to mass slaughter …  the assassins are sincerely religious Thuggees, who favor slow strangulations so as not to offend the object of their worship, the mother-Goddess, Kali .… 

“Two disciples so base as to slaughter for personal gain rather than for the greater glory of Kali have their eyes burned out and their tongues torn off; immediately after the operation, they lie huddled together on the temple floor, their faces like living skulls. These living reminders are then kept in cages for eventual use as objects on which new acolytes may perform their initiatory strangulations. 

“The mutilations and the murders are closely watched by one of the cults camp-followers (Marie Devereux), who in evident erotic convulsion clutches the knee and the thigh of a male co-religionary, while her sumptuously displayed bosom is well-qualified to arouse a simultaneous erotic pleasure in the average male spectator. She throws dry bread and water at the caged prisoners as contemptuously as if they were pigs, and smilingly watchers them grope for their sustenance in the mud, her maternal splendors again revealed before their sightless sockets, creating a kind of double irony: “If they could see they’d be tantalized, but they are denied even that.“

 “The “Tantalus“ theme re-occurs when she has the white hero (Guy Rolfe) pegged out under the noonday sun; decolletée  as ever, she placidly pours cool water into the sand where he can hear but not reach it. The theme of breasts and mutilation is echoed in the statue of Kali herself, whose pendulous dugs are a caricature of the girl, while her spindly tongue protrudes as if mocking the sinners’ mutilation.

“Gradually the film changes key, to an appallingly chilly scene where 20 or 30 thugs creep up on a caravan of sleeping merchants and travelers who sleep as nooses are skipped around their throats. The rest of the day is spent carting the corpses to a shallow mass grave into which they are calmly flung, though only after their stomachs have been sliced open so that their swelling contents will not push up the earth and reveal the whereabouts of the remains. Publicized as being in “Strangloscope,“ the film appalled even its director when he came to see it assembled.”

The Stranglers of Bombay is available within several various Hammer collections and for streaming.